Dudziak, War Time

Mary Dudziak's new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is now published. USIH readers first got a taste of her argument in her compelling contribution to the Age of Fracture roundtable I put together for the last USIH conference. Dudziak's discussion of time in relation to history generated a fascinating conversation in the comments section.

Dudziak's book is already generating some buzz. Eric Posner reviews it unfavorably at The New Republic.

Dudziak responds to Posner here.

Marking Time through War

Mary Dudziak's new work on war and time resonates with me. For those unfamiliar with Dudziak's argument you can read about it in her new book "War Time" and in an excellent essay in the California Law Review entitled, "Law, War, and the History of Time," (2010). In brief, Dudziak argues that while we have traditionally assumed that wartime is a time of "exception" (ala Giorgio Agamben), for at least the last ten years it seems wartime has replaced peacetime. As she writes in the law review essay: "Viewing war as an exception to normal life, however, leads us to ignore the longstanding persistence of war."

I couldn't agree more. In a book that I have just completed, entitled "God and War" (due out in July 2012), I noticed and attempted to play upon references to time in the debate over how war shaped different versions of an American civil religion. What follows is a brief review of some of the more interesting comments I found about time and war.

In my introduction, I found it important to deal briefly with Randolph Bourne's warning that war was "the health of the state" because through war the state exercised its ultimate power to command sacrifice. What Bourne probably didn't imagine was that his country would enter a period of almost perpetual war. And thus, as war became a constant presence in American society, it also became something more than the political barometer Bourne suggested. I argue that war grew from a moment to reckon with immediately following America's atomic bombing of Japan (the photo above is from Hiroshima) to, in our time, a source of almost theological inspiration for the nation. Along the way, a variety of actors also considered how the idea of war had grown increasingly commonplace.

One of interesting debate emerged immediately after the end of World War II that questioned whether America was in a period that could accurately be considered "post" war. The folks who wanted to return to civilian life certainly thought so. Within ten months of the war ending in Europe, nearly 11 million men and women left the military. Yet, unlike in the time of war itself, in the postwar era the nation had to prevent attacks and rally Americans intellectually as much as economically and militarily. In other words, the postwar era required leaders to frame rhetorically the imperative to sacrifice in order to stave off another war--the use of war as a means of understanding time had not ended. Most Americans agreed that following the next world war there would be no need to name a new time of war--for that war would be the last.

If we jump to the president that perhaps did more than any other to incorporate war into American life we see an interesting tension. Dwight Eisenhower knew war intimately and believed that in order to stave of a real war, he needed to rally Americans through a rhetorical or, as I argue and others such as Will Inboden contend, a theological war. And so Ike made clear that America was in a time of war that demanded fealty to the national cause--he said in a public campaign called "Back to God," "there are no atheists in foxholes...in a time of test and trial, we instinctively turn to God for new courage and peace of mind." For Ike, the cold war made American into one large foxhole.

I argue that the nation remained in that foxhole for the rest of the cold war. Until, that is, Reagan's near death experience. Others will contest this view, but I agree with John Diggins's assessment that it was Reagan who first articulated that the cold war was over (or would soon be over) in a way that pushed a substantially different understanding of time in the postwar era. Obviously, Reagan used the cold war to support a brutal war in Latin America, but he also believed and seemed willing to act on perhaps his most famous and notorious statement: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." A radical notion of time if ever there was one.

While the cold war did end, the idea that war continued to shape American life continued. As an organizing force that gave meaning amidst an "age of fracture," war became too impossible to imagine doing without. For Reagan's successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, war defined their time in office--for both, the lack of the cold war seemingly haunted them and the persistence of real war punctuated their lackluster time in office with moments of heroic pronouncements.

But the reliance on war struck theologian Stanley Hauerwas as dangerous. During the first Gulf War and crystallizing in the second, Hauerwas developed a critique of war that got at the way it began to replace any other organizing principle in American life. Among his most searing statements to this effect was one he made in a debate with Richard John Neuhaus (founder of the journal "First Things"). Hauerwas declared: "War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives war lead are worthy of such sacrifices...War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the 'American way of life.'"

Does war have something to do with the American way of life? For Hauerwas, religious support of war meant that war, rather than Christology, replaced the central way to understanding meaning in "our time." Interestingly, it was Eisenhower who in his farewell address suggested the dangers that Hauerwas pounced on. Ike ended his presidency as he began it, using prayer to convey his hopes for the nation. In his final prayer as president, he counseled Americans that they needed to become comfortable with a new understanding of time. He could not see a time that when the world would be truly postwar, nor did he believe he could hasten the postwar period by resorting to war. And so he asked for patience so that "in the goodness of time" a postwar period might be realized.

Are we beginning to imagine such a period as America draws down in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what will the absence of war do to our collective and therefore abstract understanding of the nation?

In the coming weeks, I hope to look at the theology of war in different guises and with different observers, from soldiers to professors.

Rodgers Responds (Part V of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: This response by Dan Rodgers is the fifth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. For the fourth, See Mary Dudziak's review here.
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It is a great pleasure to participate in this forum, and I am grateful to Andrew Hartman and Ben Alpers for organizing it and to Andrew, Lisa Szefel, Mary Dudziak, and Jim Livingston for their thoughtful and wide-ranging comments. Those comments have focused in part on Age of Fracture, but they have also focused on the period as a whole, on the books that others are completing (Jim’s new rereading of the late twentieth-century economy and Mary’s forthcoming book on the concept of “wartime”), and on books that they would like to see written, as Lisa urged in her HNN review and repeatedly so eloquently today. And that is as it should be. The subjects of our times are big and urgent, and there is no way that a single book can, or should presume to, encompass all of what needs to be done.

Because this forum has ranged so widely, however, it may be useful to start by saying what I intended in Age of Fracture. I wanted to think about social ideas and arguments in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but still more I wanted to map out some stories about change. I wanted to probe the ways in which certain assumptions fell out of use, new terms crowded in, and debates were reframed. This was an experience everyone felt who lived through this period, and I thought there might be something to be gained by looking at it more closely.

This is not the only way to write a period’s intellectual history. Many of our best models in intellectual history are, by design, static. They identify a period’s key thinkers and key books, they work their way into the period’s central debates, and they figure out a pattern, a wall mural of sorts, that will hold them all. This is important work, and we have all done some of it, if not in print then in our undergraduate teaching.

But I wanted to experiment with a different design: to take some key arenas of debate in which change was particularly striking and explore the ways in which, within those same arenas, the very terms, arguments, and assumptions cracked and shifted. As those who have read Age of Fracture know, I was particularly interested in those arenas where academic thought and public argument met. I wanted to probe the way economics changed its skin, how its disciplinary axis and textbook formulas shifted and how economic argument and policy shifted with them. I wanted to explore not only arguments about race and racism in American society but the ways in which the very terms for thinking about race and identity shifted. I was interested in the ways in which feminism, launched so confidently at the period’s beginning, was remade. I was interested in the ways in which notions of instantly traversable time moved into unexpected places. In the mid-twentieth-century moment in which Alexander Bickel’s jurisprudence was formed, as Mary Dudziak notes, time and history had a glacial presence. It was the point of law school and college education to demonstrate how slowly history moved and how sticky and massive its motions were.

That mid-twentieth-century moment in social thought and argument is the reference point for these and other stories of change braided through Age of Fracture: the years of the high Cold War, when recognition of the power of history, society, institutions, and social structures was at its height in the academies and in public life. By looking at the same fields of argument as their common sense shifted over the next quarter century, I thought we might learn something important both about ideas and about change.

Shaping the design of the project in this way meant leaving out a lot. Popular media, the cracking of the monopoly of network television, the extraordinarily rapid dissemination of the personal computer, the rise of new media icons, the collapse of mid-twentieth-century censorship: all this and more fell outside the core focus of the book. So did many other debates that I might have followed, not the least, as Lisa has reemphasized, the crisis, which was simultaneously a crisis in ideas, identities, politics, and society, over AIDS and its devastations. I wasn’t trying to map the whole terrain of argument and debate. The idea of a Zeitgeist went out, or should have, at the end of the nineteenth century. I was interested in probing some critically important parts of the intellectual terrain in which we now live. But there is a lot left do, and a lot that should be done.

These, then, were my intentions in writing Age of Fracture, and I’d like to think that in some ways I succeeded in realizing them. But no one should endeavor a serious project without anticipating serious critique. That, too, is as it should be. In the comments at this forum and in other venues, critical reactions to Age of Fracture have tended to cluster around three issues which, in shorthand, might be called machinery, metaphors, and mood. First, where is the causal motor to be found behind the shifts in ideas and argument that Age of Fracture describes? What drove and explains the pervasive fracturing of the vocabulary of social life into small, actor-centered pieces, imagined as choosing, preference-satisfying individuals? Second, in this quest for causal explanations, of what serious use, if at all, is a phrase like “a contagion of metaphors?” Last, what is the mood of Age of Fracture? Austere and bleak, as Michael O’Brien reads it, elegiac and funereal, as Jim Livingston has it, or ambivalent, as Andrew Hartman suggests? All of these are invitations to larger discussions about which there’s time here only to say a word.

In explaining why a larger, thicker sense of society became so much more difficult to grasp in the last quarter of the twentieth century there are two powerful arguments in the existing scholarship. The first points to the work of the conservative foundations and the efforts of their managers and business funders to alter the terms of social debate. The second points, more generally, to the new shape of the post-industrial, post-Fordist economy and the needs of the new regime of flexible accumulation for the provisional, socially disembedded selves and disembedded ideas that the era produced.

Both these explanations are terrifically important, and yet, in themselves, they both seem to me insufficient. Assuming relatively passive audiences for the books the conservative think tanks fostered and for the economic forces of the age, they leave out the enormous amount of intellectual work that pervaded the era: the arguing, debating, claiming, refuting, puzzling out, and creative intellectual imagining that also shaped these years. Without wrestling seriously with its intense intellectual labor, we miss a key part of the age.

Is it naive of me to think that we must hold simultaneously to the extraordinary importance of structures—social, economic, technical, and political--and to the extraordinary vitality of ideas, aspirations, nightmares, and theories: the stuff of the mind? I think not. For to pose it as an either-or choice—choose structures or choose culture, as Andrew Hartman proposes—seems to me a false demand. And that is not because I like some forms of structural reasoning for some purposes, and like culturalist explanations for others. Or because I like or don’t like their political outcomes. It is a false choice because there is no recognizable picture of the world that doesn’t have a strong place for both structures and ideas. To refuse a false choice isn’t to slip into ambiguity. It is a position of realism.

But once you take the demands of the late-capitalist economy out of the driver’s seat and once you recognize that money can’t, in itself, buy assent, how are we to understand the ways in which so many of these debates seemed to echo each others’ terms and assumptions? This was not the case at the outset. Economists struggling to find adequate models for the economic turmoil of the 1970s, feminists struggling to forge a politics in which the personal and the solidaristic would hold together, political theorists struggling to find explanations for power more adequate to their symbol-saturated age, and others moved initially within separate and sharply defined contours of argument and experience. Only in time did it become apparent that these efforts had taken many of them down uncannily parallel tracks.

Through a “contagion of metaphors,” I wrote, and in retrospect it is clear that I should have made it an argument not just a phrase. I won’t spell out that argument now, but it’s a realm of intellectual and cultural life that intellectual historians ought to take more seriously than we do. For nothing is more powerful in shaping ways of seeing than a claim of likeness. “War is a surgical operation.” “War is hell.” “War is a strategic game.” “War is a gigantic fog.” These are not simply phrases. They act as trump cards in academic as well as popular debate: analogies with powerful real-life consequences.

The play of opposing metaphors can lead toward standoffs; it may strew the field of argument with the radical incommensurabilities that make discussion impossible. But claims of likeness can also be generative, as ways of seeing and claiming move from one terrain to another. 1960s liberation movements were all about seeing one’s own situation and claims for justice as like that of others. To see the Berkeley campus as another version of racist Mississippi, to see the subjugation of women as just as deep as the oppressions committed in the name of whiteness, to see gays as standing in the same social space as a phalanx of other oppressed persons: the “movement” was built on likeness claims of this sort, and it fell into smaller pieces when the analogies could no longer sustain their weight.

In a parallel fashion, in what I have called an age of fracture, the metaphor which constructed the self as a choosing entity, as engaged in a kind of perpetual shopping and choice-making activity—raced through the academic disciplines and through politics alike, spilling across boundaries of academic discipline and social debate. It did so not as theory but as a claim of one context being “like” something else. This is the work of metaphor, and we should think about it more consciously and take it more seriously than we do.

Finally, a word about the mood of Age of Fracture. Some readers have found it mournful and nostalgic, though neither was my intent. I’m not as hopeful as Jim Livingston is in his new Against Thrift. I am not as convinced as he is that those aspects of social and economic change that he identifies as primitive disaccumulation are the only game in town. I am more worried by the forms of highly sophisticated accumulation going on at a terrific speed underneath us. But going back to the high Cold War era in social thought is not my aim.

Andrew Hartman worries that I take “a moral position neither for nor against our age,” but that, too, seems to me a false choice. What would it mean to be for an age, or against it? You live in the middle of the age you are in: arguing with it, shaped by it but hoping to shape it as well, inextricably part of it, struck by the beauty and courage you find in it, angry and distressed by its meanness and injustice. There is really no other place to stand than that.

I didn’t write Age of Fracture to pronounce a simple judgment on the last thirty years of American intellectual life. What I hoped to do, rather, was to take seriously the ways in which some Americans, placed where their ideas turned out to have very large consequences, talked and argued and thought their way from one set of assumptions about society and selves to another. I wanted to show that in the midst of that creative and productive ferment they let the language for some important dimensions of life fracture. I hoped that retracing those steps might help us find our way to something more adequate for our times, when our practical, collective interdependence strains against the choice-saturated language with which we try to grasp it.

Dan Rodgers

Dudziak on Rodgers (Part IV of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Mary Dudziak's review of Age of Fracture is the fourth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. Expect Dan Rodgers's response in the next day or two.

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My Age of Fracture, and reflections on Time in the History of Constitutional Theory
Mary L. Dudziak, University of Southern California Law School

I. My Age of Fracture

In the halls of the Yale Law School in the fall of 1980, the spirit of Alexander Bickel – the great constitutional theorist who died in 1974 at the age of 49, still hung in the air. Forever caught in time, Bickel’s portrait of too young a man to occupy those picture frames, graced the walls of the school’s most important lecture hall. Bickel was not simply a revered former colleague. He had become a hegemon, so that the rest of his generation’s intellectual leaders thought and wrote in his wake – his legacy generating an understanding of the world so that others had to respond to his terms. [1] He had the sort of structuring impact on legal thought that Dan Rodgers so beautifully describes as the way that ideas have a structuring impact on history at the beginning of his book.

Bickel appears as minor figure in Age of Fracture, but was so important to legal thought that for one of the next great constitutional theorists, Bruce Ackerman, his greatest legacy – a legacy no longer seen because he was so effective – was to finally change the conversation away from Bickel, shifting the terrain of constitutional discourse, and in essence, putting Bickel to rest for a second time. [2] (I will return to Bickel and Ackerman when I take up the role of time in Age of Fracture.)

Alongside Bickel’s visage, the walls of the Yale Law School were covered with portraits of aging white men, so that for women, upon entering the building, it was hard not to think that you’d entered a men’s club. But the idea of this and other American law schools as men’s clubs was not simply metaphoric, as the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson found when she taught at Yale law school as a visiting professor in the early 80s. Settling in, she sought out a restroom. On her hallway was a door that said “Faculty.” Being a member of the faculty, she of course went in the door – only to find that she had entered a men’s bathroom. [3]

In September of 1980, there was more on the walls than Bickel and other greats from the history of the Yale Law School. The Age of Fracture was, thankfully, on display. There was an underground feminist organization at the law school – an organization that, sadly, I was never invited to join (I liked law school too much, so I was not to be trusted). These women had come in secretly in the night, in an age before security systems and surveillance cameras. Alongside the venerable portraits was a poster of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Over the faces of men on some of the portraits, they had hung paper plates on which they had drawn women’s faces. [4]

These were heady days at Yale for the Age of Fracture. In Rodgers’ narrative, the Federalist Society plays a role in the fracturing of legal thought. (Rodgers mentions the Federalist Society only briefly in his discussion of the conservative turn in legal thought, but he notes its success as part of the rise of a broader conservative legal intelligentsia.) [5] But from the way it looked from within the law school those days, I wonder whether the Federalist Society was part of the fracture. To us they looked like part of the furniture.

My classmates founded the Federalist Society. Well-funded from the start, they organized a conference – their first – held at Yale in 1982. The conference is remembered warmly in their celebratory organizational histories. George W. Hicks, Jr. writes: “At a time when the nation’s law schools are staffed largely by professors who dream of regulating from their cloistered offices every minute detail of our lives . . . the Federalists met—and proclaimed the virtues of individual freedom and of limited government.” [6]

I attended this meeting – as a picket. We did not picket their existence, or the idea of individual freedom. Instead we supported freedom: we supported abortion rights, and one of their speakers was a key supporter of the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which wouldn’t limit government, but would criminalize abortion across the nation, undermining the very federalism that the Federalist Society sought to promote. If you support federalism, then you should support federalism, we argued.

The picketers are not written into the celebratory histories of the Federalist Society, though in debates at their meeting, some conservatives raised our point that their own principles would seem to support the ability of states to maintain their own rules, unimpeded by a nationalizing constitutional amendment.

For Rodgers, the Federalist Society and their colleagues helped to fracture a preexisting greater unity of ideas, which is certainly part of their own sense of origins. But there were multiple fracturings underway at the same time. We sought to shatter what to us seemed to be a hegemony furthered by our own classmates. For women on the margins, we sought to fracture a world that seemed to deny our experience. Our mere presence was a fracture. Perhaps this helps us to think about how we might write the next layer of the age of fracture – bringing the social and political history into the story, and layering the different narratives of fracture within each other, in a way that was simply not the project of Rodgers’ more sweeping narrative.

And I wonder if the periodization of fracture needs more nuance. There is an overlap at the beginning. We were still trying to break in in the early 80s, before Joan Scott and others shattered gender as a construct, as Rodgers takes up in chapter 5. Among ourselves, we were problematizing the collective “we” of earlier feminist writing, but we also needed that idea of gender solidarity in order to exist in an environment that seemed permeated with the unacknowledged gender solidarity of our male professors and students, and of the walls of the buildings themselves.

II. Time in the History of Constitutional Theory

What work is Time doing in the chapter “A Wrinkle in Time”? Sometimes “time” seems to be a stand-in for “history,” but the basic conceptualization of time, needed for there to be a “wrinkle in time” is the idea of time’s linearity. We might think of time’s linearity – its movement from a point in the past to (we hope) a distant point in the future is often assumed to a natural phenomenon. But our ideas about time come not from nature but from social life, Durkheim argued long ago. And even the idea of time’s linearity, anthropologist Carol Greenhouse has argued, itself comes from culture not from nature. [7]

William Sewell points to historians’ “implicit or working theories about social temporality.” Historians “believe that time is fateful,” he writes. “Time is irreversible,” as an event is lodged in the memory of those whom it affects and therefore irrevocably alters the situation in which it occurs.” Further, historians believe that

every act is part of a sequence of actions and that its effects are profoundly dependent upon its place in the sequence . . . . Historians assume that the outcome of any action, event, or trend is likely to be contingent, that its effects will depend upon the particular complex temporal sequence of which it is a part.

Rodgers’ understanding of the path of ideas in time is consistent with Sewell’s depiction of historians’ temporality. But within this framework, there is, for Sewell, a “diversity of temporalities” as well as an assumption that time is heterogeneous. He suggests that “Temporal heterogeneity implies causal heterogeneity. It implies that the consequences of a given act are not intrinsic in the act but rather will depend on the nature of the social world within which it takes place.” [8]

The contemporary history of time literature also stresses temporal heterogeneity. Thomas Allen writes: “the homogeneity of time that supposedly results from the centrality of such instruments as clocks, watches, and calendars to modern life is
only possible if technologies produce time by themselves.” Heterogeneous temporalities do not drive people apart, Allen argues, – so arguably are not the source of fractures – but instead “are themselves the threads out of which the fabric of national belonging has long been woven.” [9]

Age of Fracture seems to present its thinkers in a common temporality. The differences do not come from their experience of time, but instead from what they do with it. The constitutional originalists attempt to wrinkle time, he argues – to fold it back upon itself, so that present and past occupy the same moment.

In some ways, legal thought always involves this wrinkling. The past is always present in legal analysis because precedent – past cases – is an essential part of the lawyer’s tool kit. So I think the battle over constitutional theory in the 80s and after was not about whether to wrinkle time, but what sort of wrinkling was in order.

The 80s originalists, and the rest of constitutional theory, were working within the terms of Bickel’s critique of judicial review. Bickel was the most important voice in a series of works on the nature and role of judicial review in the aftermath of Brown, and also with the memory of the New Deal-era crisis over the court.

Bickel’s seminal contribution was the idea of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. In The Least Dangerous Branch, he argued that judicial review (the power of courts to strike down statutes) is inherently problematic in a democracy because courts overturn majoritarian will. Because of this, he argued for a restrained approach to judging.

1980s originalism was one answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For Bickel, judges have a constitutional role, but that role must be constrained due to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For other conservative legal thinkers, one way to constrain judicial review was originalism – so that judges would not be a band of platonic guardians displacing the majority’s will, but would play the more limited role warranted in a democracy. [10] Others, like liberal constitutional theorist John Hart Ely, also worked within the counter-majoritarian framework, carving out arguments for a more expansive role for courts within the terms of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. [11]

Putting Bickel in the center of the narrative might help us to see the originalists not as fracturing a conceptual order put in place by constitutional liberalism and the Warren Court. Instead, originalism was one methodology for responding to a critique that came earlier than the 80s, and was positioned not on the left but somewhere right of center.

Bruce Ackerman’s innovation was to argue that time mattered in a different way in constitutional theory, thereby pushing Bickel to the sidelines. “The people” – the nation’s constitutional sovereign – speak at different times in different ways, he argued, and it was in extraordinary “constitutional moments” (distinguished from everyday regular politics) that they articulate their foundational values which are then imbedded in the constitution’s meaning, whether or not the text of the constitution itself is amended. So for Ackerman, constitutional history simply had more wrinkles to it. There were more past moments that had to be brought forward to the present – most importantly the New Deal crisis over constitutional meaning, which, for Ackerman resulted not only in an extraordinary political moment, but the actual amendment of the constitution. [12]

In some ways, Ackerman’s work embodies Greenhouse’s argument that ideas of time come not from nature but from social life. The constitution’s times, for Ackerman, could not be determined from looking to formal signs, like the actual use of Article V to formally amend the constitution. Instead a constitution’s extraordinary times can be found in the life of the people, and the moments in which they take it upon themselves to infuse their age’s meaning into the constitution’s sparse words.

So in Age of Fracture, time works as an argument in legal thought, but not as an experience. I wonder whether future ages – for example an age in which electronic communications are immediate and fleeting – yet also enduring – with be thought to turn more fundamentally on an idea that the experience of time itself is fractured.

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1. Alexander Bickel’s most influential book is The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).

2. Bruce Ackerman’s turn away from Bickel’s critique of judicial review appears in a body of work including We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1991).

3. Judith Jarvis Thomson told this story to members of the Yale Law Association, myself included, when we had lunch while she was visiting at Yale.

4. I was a first year student at Yale Law School in the fall of 1980.

5. Rogers, Age of Fracture, 8. For a more detailed treatment of the Federalist Society, see Stephen M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

6. George W. Hicks, Jr., “The Conservative Influence of the Federalist Society on the Harvard Law School Student Body,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 29 (Spring, 2006): 623-718.

7. Carol Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

8. William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–7, 9–10.

9. Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 10-11.

10. A particularly influential critique of originalism is H. Jefferson Powell, “The Original Understanding of Original Intent,” Harvard Law Review 98 (March 1984): 885-948.

11. John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

12. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1998).

Tim's Light Reading (10-20-2011): War Powers, Catholicism, OWS, Academostars, and More

Relaying these bits and pieces to you while celebrating my spouse's birthday. Happy birthday, Jodi!

1. Contingency in Intellectual History (i.e. Political Philosophy)

At the Legal History Blog, Mary Dudziak points us to a new piece by Tulane University Law School Stephen Griffin's titled "Reconceiving the War Powers Debate." The basis for this discussion, as Professor Dudziak sees it (in relation to her own work), is this passage from Michael Hogan's Cross of Iron:

The most important aspect of the postwar constitutional order, one with subtle, far-reaching and long-lasting effects, was the gradual erasure of the difference between wartime and peacetime. Because all foreign wars prior to 1950 had been authorized by Congress, the prewar constitutional order featured a sharp distinction between the powers of government in war and peace. As Hogan demonstrates, the early Cold War featured a massive effort to convince the President, Congress and the public that this distinction no longer made sense.


2. Nominations Are In For The Category "America's Greatest Catholic Intellectual"

Where, you ask? Benedictine College's Gregorian Institute has a blog, and at that blog they have reported on survey wherein the Institute asked "top Catholic commentators, editors and scholars" about "America's Greatest Catholic Intellectuals." The Institute is trying to create an "online Catholic Hall of Fame." Here's their tentative nomination list:

1. Orestes Brownson (1803–1876) [right]
2. John Courtney Murray (1904-1967)
3. John Senior (1923-1999)
4. Avery Dulles (1918-2008)
5. James Schall (1928-)
6. Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)
7. Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)
8. Mary Anne Glendon (1938-)
9. George Weigel (1951-)
10. Robert P. George (1955-)

Where's John Tracy Ellis? Fulton Sheen? Where are Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day? And why do we need an intellectual star system anyway?

3. Academostars

I'd be happy to talk about Frank Donoghue's link (from immediately above) on its own merits. Here's a flavor of its content (bolds mine):

“Academostars” is a term coined by Jeffrey Williams, who edited an edition of the minnesota review on that topic in 2001. In that issue, Williams offers both a critique and a complement to David Shumway’s PMLA article, “The Star System in Literary Studies.” It’s entitled, “Name Recognition,” avoiding Shumway’s key terms. ...Williams offers one very useful qualification of Shumway’s thesis—that the star system migrated into academia sometime during the heyday of theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It did, Williams seems to acknowledge, and there are stars out there of the magnitude of Spivak, Butler, Zizek, and Fish. ...He [Williams] argues that “there are various declensions or quantum levels of stardom, ranging from who is a star in one’s department; of a specialization within a subfield (the star of 18th-century c. French furniture, as I heard a colleague called, which makes me wonder how many other people are in the field),” etc. “At the other end of the spectrum, one aspires to be the star of one’s graduate program, or of the job pool in a particular field. Hiring committees, especially at research universities, look for potential stars.” I could add that the rhetoric of stardom is thrown around, often recklessly at tenure meetings—the best way to make a pitch for a promising tenure candidate is to describe that person as a “rising star.”

My hope is that hiring committees with my name in front of them will be operating on a "Moneyball" thesis and see me as a market inefficiency to be exploited.


4.a. The Intellectual Roots of OWS

The Chronicle's Dan Berrett explores those roots. Aside from discussing the appearances of "academostars" at Zuccotti Park, here's Berrett's provocative thesis:

Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People. ...He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.

It's a great article even if you find the thesis off-putting. Let's discuss. [BTW #1: Here are some statistics that inform the direction of OWS. #2: Here's a bit about the relationship between Catholic identity and OWS]

4.b. OWS Signals the Unity of the Creative and Working Classes

John Russo, from the Center for Working-Class Studies, writes that OWS represents the falsification of Richard Florida's ten-year old thesis that the interests of the "creative class" are more important than, or different from, those of the working classes. In other words, the creative class is subject to the same dislocations and whimsical desires of financiers who prioritize profit over national solidarity.

5. The Cost of Certainty About Falsehoods

Axiom from William James: "There is truth-pursuit and error-avoidance. We don't want to have one without the other."

With that, Baylor University's Alexander Pruss speculates, or argues rather, the following:

Given some very plausible assumptions on epistemic utilities, one can prove that one needs to set more than 2.588 times (more precisely: at least 1/(log 4 − 1) times) as great a disvalue on being certain of a falsehood as the value one sets on being certain of a truth!

...Something to ponder. - TL